SHORT ESSAY ON THE NAVAL ODE

Wilson Godinho (22/12/2022)

It's never too late to revisit the Ode Marítima, as long as one finds in it not only the Portugueseness – that elegiac thing-, but also the present, in all its fullness.

Even though it dates from 1915, the ode is the mirror of a gone Portugal – and perhaps a gone European universality -, profane, telluric, dirty. A Portugal with an ancestral, bloodthirsty, purulent, pirate psyche. The Portugal of inverted contractualism - the state of nature; not the Rousseauian one, that of “God of a reverse cult”.

What then became of this Portugal? What have we done with ourselves? Where to find the lost menstruation of remote mothers? The pallor of gutted children? The black dread of machine cannon? Where? When? Like?

If technique and the machine sanitized us, it was not so much through desire as through fear; the fear of exposed bellies; the southern longing of the foreigner; the restlessness of distant islands; the oblique nausea of salt seas; of the unusual, the mysterious, the uncertain.

I am an engineer, I am a doctor, I am a pharmacist; what have we made of us? We built a domestic (or should I say domesticated?) world of labels and invoices. And all out of fear and cowardice!

What if we could strip ourselves of “the civilized attire”, “the mildness of actions”, “the innate fear of chains”, “the peaceful life”, the “seated, static, regulated and reviewed life”, the “clean, regulated ” guichets, the “gentleman”, the hygienic “sea air”?

But they give us stamps. They give us trade – trade!

They oblige us to be “strong, practical”. And what sweetness is there not in that? What a “wonderful modern maritime life, /all cleanliness, machinery and health!”. And again the anonymous beauty of the invoice; where madness died and passions were subdued. The blood, the battle, the sea, Patagonia, the rattle of the cannon, the damp holds, the vigils, the strength, the rage, “the dark and sadistic rut of the strident maritime life” are now Symbol, “Abstract Distance”.

And even so – even collecting passions and drunkenness! -, we would never let go of the “skirts of civilization”; the melodious idleness of civilization, “modern humanitarianism”!

But I doubt you won't come with me for a second, reader! How much of Portugal is in the sea and in the blood? How much Universal is this soul-blood chiseling? And if you don't come – even if it's for brief and fleeting instants, with open eyes that only the dream can cover - then the “Far away”, “the mist of God” doesn't belong to you; and your fraternity is either revolutionary (this French and Russian one!) or people who make dreams come true in this polite world, where one can “easily see everything”.